Your Monthly Momecdote, Issue 29: September, 2026

This blog post was originally published in my September newsletter. Subscribe to receive next month's essay along with book and music recommendations.

Nostalgia is an obvious sales tactic at this point; I think we can all agree on its ubiquity. Most recently, I saw an ad for dog food featuring some of those classic, movie-esque clips of 80s and 90s summers with the message “your beloved family dog probably ate [insert kibble brand here]; it was good then and it’s better now.” Which, I can admit, is very effective advertising and is, overall, relatively benign. But one of the inherent traps with nostalgia is that it trades on sociopolitical myths of things having been “better” when they were also more exclusive, less available to the majority of people. So while nostalgia-core has moments of being appealing and fun—I’m not immune to the pull of things that remind me of my own childhood; or rather, the “quintessential” American childhood I longed to have but didn’t—I keep finding myself depressed by it. In many situations, it’s like—don’t exploit my sadness for a world that no longer exists explicitly because of you, you know? It feels like increasing proof that what we’re told is progress isn’t progress for most people, or maybe even at all.  

This is well-trodden territory for me. I’ll keep talking about it in a second, but I just want to say, in a quick side quest specific to being a mother, how interesting it is that current parents seem so nostalgic for a halcyon past—think the social media trend of so-called "90’s summer"—and yet most parents I know don’t actually seem interested in allowing their kids to grow up the way we did. I don’t plan to track my child, for example. I understand the constancy of fear as a parent, but I also think my son deserves not only privacy, but agency. The internet is a far more dangerous place for him than the real world, especially within the structure of his community. He goes to the local public school, which is walking distance from our house; we often run into people we know at the park in our neighborhood; overall, he is known and cared for. But indulging the little episodes of independence he craves as he keeps growing means contending with the kind of parent who believes he requires surveillance at all times.

By this I mean: we routinely go to the same Trader Joe’s, a few blocks from our house, often multiple times a week. They hide a stuffed parrot around the store, and if kids are able to find it, then they get to claim their prize from the info desk: a lollipop. Lately, the Boy King has been asking to be allowed to look for the parrot on his own while I finish our shopping. I hesitate every time; it’s hard having him out of my sight, not only because he’s out of sight, but because he’s not yet an expert at watching where he’s going and I’m sensitive to him being a disruption to others. But if the store isn’t very busy, I hardly think it’s egregious, and certainly not dangerous—the staff at Trader Joe’s are particularly friendly, so it’s one of the better places for him to test out a sampling of freedom. (“Do you remember when we weren’t together for a little while? That was REALLY fun,” he said last time, something that doesn’t bother me at all.) But both times I have recently allowed him to do this (for a maximum of two or three minutes out of sight, and I can still hear his little footsteps; it’s a small store) other shoppers have stopped him to demand that he tell them where his mother is. It’s not inappropriate for them to do so, necessarily, but it does beg the question of whether nostalgia can coexist with what’s expected of the modern parent, particularly the modern mother. Each time I’ve allowed something that clearly brings my son a lot of joy, I’ve felt distinctly judged, and I’m still in the process of asking myself whether it’s my behavior that’s questionable or theirs.  

(For the record—my adolescence if my mother could track me? I keep pointing this out to other parents who seem to have lost perspective on how terrible this would have been. Like, yikes.)

Anyway, nostalgia. There was nothing inherently better about fashion or music or politics in the nineties and the aughts except for one very obvious thing: it existed pre-internet. Pre-Instagram face, pre-surveillance (fuck you, creepy Meta glasses). One recent read on this subject was Jia Tolentino’s Weekend Essay for the New Yorker: Our Plastic Surgery Nightmare, about the “grim” beauty ideals established by artificial women, which coincides with the disappearance of women’s media. Read the essay in lieu of whatever I might add to it. But what’s also interesting to me is that Tolentino references an urge to “reject modernity and embrace the religion of [her] childhood”—a religion that is equally rooted in unequal gender expectations and norms. Another form of nostalgia I'm encountering a lot, that things were better because of faith, when in all likelihood, things were better because you could still be an individual. It's fundamentally a form of privilege to long for the past—a past that rejected queerness and marginalized identity, that offered fewer resources or compassion for disability or neurodivergence, among other things.

Nothing is static; social tolerance has changed before and can again. Our rights are contracting now, which is why we have to fight for them, and why nostalgia can be dangerous. To be locked inside the past is to undermine your ability to do anything about the future. It’s no wonder it can sell so many P.E.-reminiscent track pants and tiny wired headphones, though. What wouldn’t we pay to be free of these constraints?

We announced the cover for NEWPHORIA! recently, and for obvious reasons, I love it. I asked for “literary Lisa Frank” (yes, I told you, I am also susceptible to nostalgia) and Dana Li delivered in the absolute best and most delightful way. But I’m pleased to tell you that NEWPHORIA!, despite being about the very things I discussed above—also the way the “loneliness epidemic” and ballooning economic disparity are practically holding hands—is yet another thought exercise belonging to a prior self. The primary stakes in NEWPHORIA! revolve around personhood; about what it means to be a person in a world that values only what you produce, only what it can sell to you, only what aspects of you it can exploit. But already, I feel differently than I did when I first wrote it. NEWPHORIA! is a black comedy, and ultimately a cautionary tale: Change the way you define humanity or watch humanity irreversibly change. But I want you to know that I don’t feel hopelessness. Shockingly—well, it varies from hour to hour—I don’t feel doom.

While I was on the DREAMLAND tour, I spent time casually with multiple authors I would categorize as very successful. (One thing about publishing: nobody has a clear or accurate idea of where they fall in the market, but quantifiably, these authors surpass me in either accolades, longevity, or sales.) At the beginning of my tour, I was identifying something, a growing feeling of desolation. I felt it was individual to me, a self-pitying sense that everything I’d built was slipping away, receding as I moved toward it. I felt mechanical, hollow, empty—I’d never felt that way before, like I was tired somewhere deep in my soul. But then I spoke to these other authors and realized they felt the same thing I did. They all said, without prompting, that “it wasn’t fun anymore.” I was shocked; I’d thought I was struggling alone, that my problems were my fault, that it was me who couldn’t shock myself out of my slow-spiraling outlook. And abruptly, I understood that it wasn’t my problem. It was all of ours, and I’d be willing to bet it comes not from the industry—not solely from the industry, anyway—but as a result of being online. Part of the loneliness lives in the constancy of dissonance: the way sales numbers or bestseller lists aren’t “real” but the screaming voice who says you’re a bad writer who can’t execute an idea is, undeniably so. Reality gets harder and harder to define. The negativity is always easier to believe than the praise. That it must somehow be your fault becomes your burden—and even a thick-skinned, much-beloved author is hard-pressed to make that voice go away.

Which is! Like I said! The exact subject of NEWPHORIA!—a book that revolves around what you’re willing to do or say when the subject of your unhappiness or unsatisfaction is no longer a person to you anymore. Which isn’t to say don’t write the negative review; I do believe reader spaces are important and art is subjective, so the opinion isn’t at fault. But it is to say it’s become commonplace, that the part of us that can say something unkind or thoughtless about a person we don't know is the same part of us that can take shortcuts with generated stolen work, that doesn't hesitate to criticize strangers on social media, that can doomscroll and feel the weight of suffering as something ubiquitous, un-individual, impersonal. Morality at this moment is culturally ever-present and yet meaningless: jump through the hoops of virtue-signaling, but don’t hesitate to cut people out of your life. Prioritize your comfort, your ease, don’t worry if it stunts your growth, if it cuts off the tap of your compassion. The truth is there’s not much to be gained by scrolling or posting; the world only changes if the systems it’s built on change first. But a world that pardons your incuriosity, that validates your slow-growing calluses… that’s a world telling you the future is inevitable and unavoidable. It’s the same world saying AI is here to stay, get over it. It’s saying that progress will bury you—so I’m just here to point out very casually: if that makes you feel lonely, then you’re not alone.  

I mentioned above some books that improved the state of my world: THE SWAN’S DAUGHTER made me feel nostalgia for a childhood full of hope and whimsy and (eventual) tolerance for uncertainty. PRAIRIE FIRES did the strange job of soothing my climate anxiety by showing me the way in which our climate—environmental and contextual—isn’t wholly unprecedented, it’s been dealt with before. It helped me remember, just as I was beginning to really descend in my own misery, that there is still time. The future isn’t here. It’s in progress, cobbled together by us, who don’t just swim within its current. We make it—we are making it, right now, by what we do or don't accept.  

Something I tell myself whenever I’m tempted by the siren call of a ‘90s silhouette (never the 2000s; you won’t fool me twice, layered lace tank tops and low-rise jeans): Don’t long for an imaginary past. Reach for an imaginary future. Is that thing they call “progress” actually serving you, or are you just giving into it? These may feel like empty words for now, and yeah, fine, they are. But if you can see it, then you’ve got a vision. At the very least, it’s a start.